Tools for Capturing Game Footage
Fraps www.fraps.com
Captures audio and video - audio is 16 bit stereo uncompressed wav format, video is uncompressed avi.
Free version has 30 second limit for each video.
Free version puts a www.fraps.com watermark at the top of each video.
Can capture footage at half of the resolution you play the game at for better performance.
Captures video up to 1152x864 and 100 frames per second(newest version)
Gamecam www.planetgamecam.com
Captures for speed or quality - (0-20)
Free version does not capture audio
Encodes directly to wmv or avi(in mp42 format which is much smaller than Fraps uncompressed video)
Has a "cached" feature for better capturing performance
Can increase or decrease the brightness of your clips before you encode
Choice of aspect ratio - normal(4:3), widescreen(16:9), or custom(X:Y)
Newest version can capture at 1024x768 and higher
Ability to put your own watermark on your captured video with positioning and transparency options.
Vsync should be on when using gamecam
Gamecam is definitely more customizable, but has compatability problems with some games.
If you don't want the fraps watermark and don't need audio from NBA Live, try gamecam.
Both programs perform better when you play at a lower resolution(i.e. 800x600 instead of 1024x768).
Tools for Encoding Captured Footage
Windows Movie Maker (WMM)
Free with WinXP
Straightforward, drag and drop, and encode
www.windowsmoviemakers.net has in-depth tutorials and tips, and forums for help with creating videos
using WMM.
VirtualDub
Free forever
Go to virtualdub.sourceforge.net to download
Contains filters for cropping,letterboxing,resizing, blurring, sharpening, adding logos, deinterlacing,
coloring, brightness/contrast,etc.
Can delete,duplicate frames or a selection of frames/audio, change frame rate, decimate frame-rate.
Adobe Premiere, Premiere Pro
Very powerful and professional
Takes a while to learn
Multi-track processing of video/audio
Other tools for encoding include Pinnacle Studio, Sony Vegas Movie Studio, Ulead MediaStudio Pro,
CyberLink PowerDirector, Roxio - VideoWave,etc. Most of these cost several hundred dollars.
Encoding with WMM
Open explorer and navigate to the folder where you captured your videos. Open WMM and drag the videos
you want to encode to the left under "collections". Select the clip you want and drag it to the far
left of the storyboard at the bottom. If you are making a compilation of clips, drag them one by one
to the storyboard next to one another. You can spice it up by adding transitions. Click on "Tools" on
the menubar and click "video transitions". Drag a transition to the little box with the arrow inbetween
clips on the timeline.
When your ready to encode click "File" on the menubar and click "Save Movie File".
A box will come up, click the "My Computer" option and click next. Enter the name of the movie you want
to save and select the folder you want to save it in, then click next. Unless you already see choices in
the next window, click the blue text that sais "show more choices...". If your not going to upload the
video for others to see then choose "Best quality for playback on my computer". If you plan on uploading
your file, I recommend the "other settings" option. If your captured video was a little choppy(low fps)
during playback, choose "Video for broadband (150 Kbps)". That will encode a 320x240 movie at 15 fps.
If you encode choppy video at 30 fps your just wasting space and other peoples bandwidth. If your captured
video has fluid motion but the resolution of your captured video was less than 640x480, try "Video for
broadband (512 Kbps)". That will encode a 320x240 video at 30 fps. If your captured vid was 640x480 or
higher and has fluid motion choose "Video for broadband (768 Kbps)" OR (1.0 Mbps) for a little more quality.
Click next to encode your movie. If you are encoding a compilatoin of clips it will take a few minutes.
The encoder will use all of your cpu time, so if you try to do something else on your computer it will lag
heavily. Play your video when its done to see if you like it. This is the easiest and fastest way.
You can also save your video as an avi using the DV-AVI(NTSC) codec instead of "Video for Broadband" and
convert your AVI with the latest VirtualDub to another format. I saved a 19 second clip and it was just
under 66 mb, so you'll have a large file if you are making a long video. If you can't open the AVI file
in VirtualDub, you'll have to find the Panasonic DV codec on the net. Older virtualdub versions cannot open
DV-AVI's saved from WMM properly, so use the latest v1.6.11.
Encoding with VirtualDub
In VirtualDub, we are going to encode to Xvid or Divx. Both are pretty much the same, but Xvid can encode
Divx and Divx 5 compatible videos, and has more advanced options to mess around with. Divx has a bit better
quality, and a more user friendly interface. You will need to download one or the other if you don't have
them - www.xvid.org, www.divx.com. Both are free, however Divx offers a Pro version.
Open Virtualdub, drag and drop your video into the program. If you want to add
more clips choose the "append segment..." option in the "File" menu.
Once you have appended your clips, click on the "Video" tab in the menubar and select "Full Processing Mode".
If you want to resize your video click "Filters..." under the "Video" tab, click "Add", click "resize".
Input your new resolution but try to stick with a 4:3 aspect ratio like 320x240, 384x288, 400x300, 480x360,
512x384, 560x420, 624x468, 640x480. Make sure both your width and height are a multiple of 4 for compatibility.
Set the resize filter mode to "Lanczos3". You can add other filters if you like, like sharpening, but the
more filters you add the slower the encoding gets. Once your happy with your filters click on the "Video" tab
again and click "Compression". Here you can select which codec to compress with. For this guide I will use Xvid.
Select Xvid and click the configure box. Select "Twopass - 1st pass" in the "Encoding type" menu, and click OK
at the bottom right. Click OK in the "select video compression" box. Click "File" and click "Save As..." in
the dropdown menu. Choose your folder, name your file and click save. This is the "first pass" of the compression.
The codec analyzes the file and saves information that will help it encode the video for better quality. An
"Xvid status" box should come up during the first pass.
If it doesn't, stop your first pass by clicking the "abort" button on the virtualdub status
window. Go back to "Video", "Compression" and click "Configure". Click "Advanced Options" at the bottom of
the configure box. Click the "Debug" tab and make sure the "Display encoding status" box is checked. Here you
can also choose what codec you want to decode your video. Choosing DIVX or DX50 in the "FourCC used" box will
allow people who have the Divx codec but not the Xvid codec to watch your video.
When the first pass is done, look at the total(13034) in the xvid status window, it should be right above the
"avg bitrate (kbps)" box at the bottom right. I am going to divide this by 4 for the final file size of the
video, I could go a little lower like dividing by 5 or 6, but I've learned to trust 4 for good quality/file
size when I use resolutions above 400x300. You can also just use the bitrate(4241) and divide it because you
can choose a filesize or a bitrate for your second pass. Go back to "Video", "Compression", and "Configure".
Change "Encoding type" to "Twopass - 2nd pass" and enter your computed bitrate or filesize. In this case, I
approximated and just put 4400 which is a little more than 13034/4. If you click the "Target size" box you can
just enter an average bitrate (4241/4=1060~).
This next section is if you have audio recorded with your video.
Now close the configure box and the compression box. Click the "audio" tab and select "Full processing mode"
like we did with the video. Select MPEG Layer-3 or LAME MP3 or Fraunhauffer MP3, depending on what you have.
Choose a low bitrate like 56 or 64 and only 22,050 Hz, Stereo. You can even choose 24 or 32, 22,050, Mono unless
you put music to your video. You can put music to your video by clicking "wav audio" in the audio tab and browse
for a wav file. In VirtualDubMOD, which is a modified version of VirtualDub, you can add an mp3 file directly
to the video by clicking "streams" and clicking "add".
Click OK on any remaining dialog boxes. Click File, Save As..., and then Save. Your video finally gets encoded.
If you are unsatisfied with your result you can do the 2nd pass over again with a different filesize/bitrate
without having to do the first pass again.
Adobe Premiere Pro
If you have Adobe Premiere/Premiere Pro you can make professional looking videos. Open Premiere, and select
"new project" from the dialog box that comes up. Click on the custom settings tab and set the General settings
to what I have below.
Editing Mode - DV Playback
Timebase - 23.976
Pixel Aspect Ratio - Square Pixels (1.0)
Fields - No Fields (Progressive Scan)
Display Format - 24fps Timecode
Title Safe Area - 0 for both
Action Safe Area - 0 for both
Sample Rate - 48000 or 44100 Hz
Display Format - Audio Samples
Enter a name for your project and click OK
Importing clips
Drag your files from Explorer to the Project window at the upper left. Adobe will "conform"
the audio(if there is any) in the videos, it should only take a few seconds. If you just want all your clips to
play one after the other, then select them all in the Project Window and drag them to the "Video 1" track in the timeline.
All your clips will be loaded on the timeline. You may get a "can't allocate memory for Fraps codec"
or something, just click OK and continue. As you can see, there are black bars on the side of the video in the
preview window. This is normal, but you can remove them and what sucks is you have to do it for every clip.
To remove them, click on the display of the video, drag the small box on the side to the edge to remove the black bars.
Now to make it easier for every other clip we're going to save this as an effect preset. Right click on
the Motion tab in the "effect controls" and select "save preset". Give it a name, but don't change anything.
My preset is saved as "Resize Live clip". When your done with and ready to encode, Double click on "presets" in the
Project window. Drag your preset onto EVERY video clip on your timeline.
Adding Music
Same as the video, drag the song you want into the Project window at the upper left. Then drag it from the
Project window down to a blank audio track, like Audio 2 or 3. Problem: Your song doesn't match the length of
all your videos and if you want it to, there's one of two things you can do. If its close to the end you can
change the speed of the audio without too much of a difference. Delete your song from the audio track. Hover
your mouse over the yellow bar on the timeline above your video, a box should come up with the Start/End/Duration
that your compilation is. Remember the duration, mine is 3:41:08. Drop your song back into the timeline. Right
click your song on the timeline and select "Speed/Duration" and make sure the "Maintain Audio Pitch" box is checked.
Change the time in blue to match what you had for video, I'm changing 3:49:11 to 3:41:08. This makes the audio
play a little bit faster, but barely noticeable since I'm only changing it a little bit.
You can also change the video duration instead of the audio. Make sure you do not have your song on any audio
track. Click on the "File" menu and select "New -> Sequence".
This will open a new sequence, don't worry about
your videos they are still in sequence 1. Drag your audio to any audio track except "Audio 1". Hover your mouse
over the yellow bar and remember the duration of the clip. Now go to your Project Window and drag "sequence 1"
onto the timeline of sequence 2. Right click on 'sequence 1" in the timeline and click "Speed/Duration". Make
sure "Maintain audio pitch" is checked. Change the duration of sequence 1 to the same as the audio track.
Adding Transitions
Transitions will make your video look cool. Click on the "Effects" tab in the "Project Window". Double click on
"Video Transitions" or click the arrow to the left of transitions to bring down the transitions. There is a whole
lot to choose from. Double click on the transition you want to use, and multiple types of transitions show up.
I chose a "Dissolve" transition called "Cross Dissolve". This is a basic fade effect which fades the first clip
out while fading in the second. Click and drag the transition inbetween the two clips that you would like to use the effect on.
You may get a window about insufficient media, click OK and continue. Click on the transition,
which is the purple bar with diagonal lines through it. In the monitor window, "Effect Controls" should show the
settings for your transition. Here you can make transitions shorter or longer by clicking the edge of the purple
rectangle with diagonal bars and dragging it. If you got the pop up dialog about insufficient media then you should
do the following.
Click on the clip above the purple rectangle and drag it to the right until a vertical black line shows up.
The black line indicates that the end of your clip and the end of your transition are at the same exact spot. Do the
same for the bottom clip but drag it to the left. Your transition should be smooth now.
Encoding/Saving
Click on the File menu and select "Export -> Movie" if you want to compress to an avi. Click "settings" on the
lower right of the "Export Movie" window. If you want to save it as a compressed AVI, select "Microsoft AVI" from
the "File Type" dropdown box. Click on the "Video" tab, choose a compressor and configure it to your likings.
Try to choose an MPEG4 codec like Divx(doesn't show up on the list for me), Xvid(doesn't work well in Adobe for me),
or Window Media Video 9(slow when encoding with it in avi's), Microsoft MPEG-4 V2(old and dated). Type in the
resolution you want the video to be (320x240, 400x300, 512x384, 640x480). Try to keep the aspect ratio at 4:3.
Leave all the other settings alone unless you know what your doing. Now Click OK. If you have problems encoding
compressed AVI's in Adobe (like me), select "Microsoft DV AVI", but make sure you have many gigabytes of hard drive
space free because a 3 minute DV-AVI could be 700 mb. Uncheck the box for "add to project when finished" and next
to "embedding options" select none. Make sure "Entire Sequence" is selected next to the "Range" setting. Click OK,
name your movie, click save and step away from the computer for a while because it will be using all your processor's
time. When your done and you have a huge interlaced DV-AVI file, open it in Virtualdub. If you can't open it,
download the Panasonic DV codec and install it. Select the "Video" tab and click "filters". Click "Add" and choose
"deinterlace" from the list. Click "configure" and click the button next to "linear blending" to get rid of the
interlacing effects and click OK to close the window. Click OK on the filters window to close it. Make sure "Full
processing mode" is selected in the "Video" and "Audio" tabs. Select your codecs to compress like in the virtualdub
section above.
You can also save a movie in wmv format like in WMM. Click "File -> Export -> Adobe Media Encoder"(or Advanced Windows
Media). Select a preset and click OK. Choose something like "WM9 NTSC 512k download" if you are going to post it on a
file host or "WM9 PAL streaming" if you are going to post it on a streaming video host. You can always customize the
settings like resolution and bitrate if you like. You can also use older WMV codecs like WM8 or WM7. When your done
with your settings, click OK and your video will begin to save.
Have Fun!
awesome 
.. i mean like dahls shoe store type... know what im sayin?
